Our ecosystem touches the lives of billions of people every single day, creating a new opportunity for our customers and partners and positively impacting local communities.
In Kenya, our partner M-KOPA Solar has connected hundreds of thousands of homes across sub-Saharan Africa to solar power for the first time using the Microsoft Cloud, innovating with a pay-as-you-go model that helps households living on less than $2 a day establish a credit history.
In Arizona, we are applying Dynamics 365 to improve outcomes among one of the state’s most vulnerable populations — the more than 15,000 children in foster care. In Poland, MedApp is using HoloLens to help cardiologists visualize a patient’s heart as it beats — in real-time — reducing the amount of time they then need to perform open-heart surgery.
In Kona, Hawaii, Jack’s Diving Locker is using Microsoft 365 to connect its 50 employees across land and sea so that they can focus on what they do best — protect pristine coral reefs and take people diving.
In Washington state, Karrick Johnson, an 8-year-old with dyslexia, avoided reading in class until he started using our Learning Tools. And in Cambodia, underserved children in rural communities are learning to code with Minecraft, opening doors to futures that would have previously been unimaginable.
Across the globe, enterprise customers in every industry — from iconic brands like Coca-Cola Company and Chevron Corporation to ZF Group, a car parts manufacturer in Germany — are using our technology to build their digital capability so they can thrive in a world where every company is a software company.
Walmart —the world’s largest company by revenue, and its biggest private employer — chose Azure and Microsoft 365 to fuel its digital transformation, transforming the shopping experience for customers and empowering their more than 2 million associates to do their best work.
In sum, our platforms create broad surplus everywhere, from the farmer who can apply precision agriculture to conserve resources and increase yields, to the hospital that can lower the cost of healthcare and improve patient outcomes, to the largest companies of the world reaching new customers in new markets.
The breadth and depth of our mission and the trust customers are placing in us to power their digital transformation enables us to have this broad impact — and it is fueling our results.
In fiscal 2018, we delivered $110.4 billion in revenue and $35.1 billion in operating income and returned $21.5 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
Our commercial cloud business delivered more than $23 billion in revenue, exceeding the ambitious goal we had set to achieve $20 billion in annualized commercial cloud revenue by the end of fiscal 2018, nine months ahead of schedule. Also, we expanded our commercial cloud gross margin to 57 per cent, up 7 points year-over-year.
These are strong results — and yet the opportunity ahead in a world powered by an intelligent cloud and edge is unprecedented.
Imagine a future where all of your apps and experiences revolve around you and transcend any single device; where data in any form is analyzed in real-time so that computers can anticipate and even act on your behalf and augment what you would otherwise be able to accomplish on your own.
And where computing is more distributed and embedded in the world, from intelligent digital assistants at work, on the go and in your home that you can communicate within a myriad of ways — voice, eyes or gestures — to oil rigs that adjust production in real-time as demand fluctuates in global markets.
Across each of our customer solution areas, we are broadening our offerings and accelerating our innovation to capture the opportunities this new era will create for our customers and better meet their unarticulated needs.
